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Fire Starters: Cotton Balls and Vaseline

How, in all my years of camping and girl-scouting and camp-directoring, have I never heard about this??

We are taking our kids from the youth center camping this week, and as we were brainstorming an activity to do with them yesterday in preparation, my friend Meggie casually said, “My roommate just made fire starters for her camping trip out of cotton balls and vaseline.”

And my life was forever changed.

I googled the steps to this, just to make sure we had it right. But it’s basically this:

1. Take a cotton ball.

2. Cover it in vaseline.

3. Light it on fire.

We used this experiment as an excuse to roast marshmallows over a charcoal grill on the blacktop behind the youth center. Anything for s’mores, right? And we now have a bunch of baggies with vaseline-covered cotton balls, ready to start a fire on our camping trip. Brilliant.